Homeless Iraq vets

"Experts say growing numbers of former servicemen and women — wracked by post-traumatic stress disorder and brain injuries and struggling with substance abuse and other ills — are winding up on the streets. ...more

Great YouTube video on Immigration from Michael Joseph & Katerina of 'Vox Nova'

Good post and discussion

Be sure to read the comments

Podcast: Antiwar Radio: Scott Horton Interviews Don Craven Jr., Ray McGovern

Don Craven, director of the new film World War IV: A Letter to the President, and Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst featured in the movie, discuss the film and some of the themes within it: The neocons and the Israel Lobby, the lies regarding the “weapons of mass destruction” that led to war, the role of Christian Zionists in the War Party, Michael Ledeen’s admission of war crimes, and possible consequences of war with Iran.

MP3 here.

Don Craven is a Texas businessman and former Bush campaign donor turned documentary film maker.

Ray McGovern is a retired CIA analyst of 27 years.

Umberto Eco's piece on Mac and DOS, Catholic and Protestant

Battling Phony Right-Wing Christians: What Every Progressive Needs To Know About True Christian Economics

Great podcast...

The American Left's Silly Victim Complex

"a crucifixion on a worldwide scale"

Back in 1992, while an Australian film crew was making a documentary of his life at Shantivanam in South India, Fr. Bede Griffiths made some unusual observations:

“ The whole human race has now come to the moment when everything is at stake, when a vast shift of consciousness will have to take place on a massive scale in all societies and religions for the world to survive.”

When asked if he believed that the human race could survive, Fr. Bede responded:

“ Yes, but it will cost everything. Just as Jesus had to go through death into the new world of the Resurrection, so millions of us will have to go through a death to the past and to all old ways of being and doing if we are going to be brought by the grace of God into the truth of a real new age. The next twenty years will unfold a series of terrible disasters, wars and ordeals of every kind that will reveal if the human race is ready to die into new life or not...Either total destruction or total transformation is possible and depends on us, on what we choose and how we act.” ¹

^CONTINUE

Trinity, Creation and the Energy of Love [By Brian J. Pierce, O.P]

picture by Alex Grey

...Fr. Bede begins by calling attention to the web of inter - relationships of which we are all part, in and among ourselves, and with God. As he was so fond of doing, Fr. Bede draws on the wisdom of the New Physics to point to a scientific way of talking about the energy fields which hold us all together in an interdependent whole. He then says that the same inter-being (to use Thich Nhat Hanh's phrase) is also at the heart of the fluid process of differentiation in the Godhead. "We all come from the Source, the Absolute, which is an interdependent relationship," he says. God's inter-being and ours is one. Bede points to this interdependence in the Hindu tradition, showing how there is a dynamic interplay between Shiva and Shakti, a vibration of energy and movement, called Spanda. "The whole creation comes into being through that Spanda, through the vibration between Shiva and Shakti," says Fr. Bede. It is, he notes, a transcendent reality, a divine movement, which becomes manifest in the created world.

Moving then to the Buddhist tradition, Bede draws on a quote from a great Zen teacher, Suzuki, in which he said that "Sunyata is not static but dynamic." So even in Buddhism, even in the great emptiness of sunyata, notes Bede, there is a movement, a tendency towards outpouring. "In the void there is a constant urge to differentiate itself. And the whole creation is the differentiation of the void...At the very moment of the differentiation it returns to itself. It is always coming out and returning." The void flows out in differentiation and simultaneously returns to the void. "That is why the Buddhists say that Nirvana and Samsara are the same," says Fr. Bede. "Ultimately they are one."

CONTINUE...

Generation F*cked: How Britain is Eating Its Young

“According to the Unicef report, which measured 40 indicators of quality of life – including the strength of relationships with friends and family, educational achievements and personal aspirations, and exposure to drinking, drug taking and other risky behaviour – British children have the most miserable upbringing in the developed world. American children come next, second from the bottom… The downward spiral of our progeny has been done to death in glorious tabloid Technicolor, but rather than dwelling on the carnage in order to understand our own part in this tragedy, we’ve instead moved to the role of cynical observer. Now we are busily examining the new life that has emerged from the wreckage: the Chav, Britain’s very own white trash… the label is thought to derive from ‘charva’ – the Roma word for child… Mocked for their expanding waistlines, plummeting vocabularies, ‘Croydon facelift’ hairstyles, and a slavish devotion to gold jewellery and knocked-off Burberry sportswear, Chavs have become figures of chortlingly ironic ridicule by the media. But only from a distance. Because make no mistake, these most marginalised of children are neither poor nor noble savages. They throw dogs from bridges in front of trains. They beat fathers into comas to make mobile phone videos for YouTube. They are every bit as unpleasant as they are damaged… Chavs are the foot soldiers of corporate consumerism… They own expensive sports gear, expensive mobiles, watch Murdoch satellite channels on large flatscreen TVs, and aspire to a souped-up motor with a massive stereo system. They are not so much poor as culturally and imaginatively impoverished, because the main characteristic of Chavs is not social class but an utter lack of hope… That Chavs seek the more crass and vulgar ostentations of material wealth is just a refection having been colonized by consumer capitalism. The Chavs are Thatcher’s revenge.” [Adbusters]

Einstein on God and Religion

Einstein on God and Religion

Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.

I am not an atheist. I don´t think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but does not know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being towards God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws.

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder or stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly : this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.

Radiant Light online Art Gallery -- paintings by Elizabeth Wang

The Dawkins Delusion, By Alister McGrath, AlterNet

Good Video [Mediocre song]

Memo to the Queen:

June 18, 2007

By DON SANTINA

Dear Elizabeth II,

What a dandy duo of imperialism you and our own George II made during your recent visit to Jamestown. How appropriate that together you celebrated the 400th anniversary of the theft of indigenous lands in the Americas.

It wasn't long after the settlement of Jamestown that your country introduced the plantation system into Ireland, forcing the Irish off their lands and replacing them with loyal British settlers. And then there was the rest of world to seize.

Those pesky Irish were always rebelling, so-between Cromwell and the Penal Laws--your people turned that country into a charnel house of cultural genocide which included denying people access to the resources of their own land. The subjugation of the Irish was an illustrative model for our own George II as he and his corporate comrades made plans to lay waste the people and culture of Iraq and take their oil. The tragedy for the people of Iraq is that our own George II didn't read the part where people don't like being occupied by somebody else and will fight to the death over the right to their own land. Of course, maybe he just didn't get it; the original story was prettied up by the embedded historians, like most of our Anglo-American history books....CONTINUE

6 Songs from NPR's 'The New Monastics' show

Jes Karper, Psalters, John Mallinen, Derek Webb, Mewithoutyou..

some good tunes, with heart, soul and spirit

Homer and Bart in 'Catholic Heaven'

Some criticisms of Ron Paul to check out:

Be sure to read the comments, as their are good points being made from various angles.

6/16/06: Memorial of the Immaculate Heart of Mary

Most Holy Mother of God, pray for us in this hour of our need, that we may turn away from the path of destruction and be filled with the Spirit of your Son to build up the New Creation of Justice, Peace and Love

NPR' Speaking of Faith: "The New Monastics" [Audio interview with Shane Claiborne]

PURE DYNAMITE!

Brian McLaren: correcting Media Myopia [via Sojo]

Memo to self: Check out this blog and post some comments

http://soupiset.typepad.com/

Discussion of Amnesty controveresy at dotCommonweal

Amnesty International Distresses Many of Its Supporters

[Note Jim Forest's & Fr. Dan Berrigan's commnets]

Contact: Rachel M. MacNair, Ph.D.AI Campaign Coordinator, Consistent LifePhone: 816-753-2057 (Central Time Zone)

Despite pleas from many supporters, Amnesty International (AI) has recently adopted a new policy which ignores human rights documents it has historically advocated for; specifically, The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child states that every child “needs special safeguards and care, including legal protection, before as well as after birth.” [Resolution 1386(XIV) of 20 November 1959]. AI has stated that abortion should be decriminalized and the governments should see that there is access to it in particular cases. While it maintains its previous stand against blatantly forced abortions, the pressures that coerce and abandon women to abortion have been ignored. AI decision-makers appear unaware that women who have had abortions make up one of the largest constituency groups of the anti-abortion movement.

The AI International Executive Committee took this action despite indications that substantial numbers of members disapproved. Internal polling in AI’s U.K. chapter showed a plurality against it. The results of an on-line vote of members in the United States last Fall have yet to be announced. A member who tried to leaflet other members on this issue at the U.S. national conference on March 24 was barred, and when she asked if she was being censored, she was told yes. For more details and documentation, see http://www.consistent-life.org/ai.html.A registry of AI supporters who pled with AI not to take this step is available at http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/consistentlife. Signers include Fr. Daniel Berrigan, who commented: “My moral conviction on abortion and the rights of the unborn are more serious than 'a point of view' . . . It's as close to my conscience as war and the death penalty.” Other signers include Jim Forest, Founder of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation; Prisoner of Conscience Tom Cordero; and Cecilia Brown, noted for her international gay-rights activism. Shelley Douglass, known for her leadership in anti-nuclear weapons activism, states, “as time passes, we will come to understand the violence of abortion.” CONTINUE...

Why are the republicatholics ignoring Ron Paul?

Great post and discussion at CatholicAnarchy

Be sure to check out the discussion.

money quote:

"The military-industrial complex is still Moloch, whether it’s in Republican or Democratic hands."
--Comment by Gene McCarraher

Flagday, June 14th, 2007: 'Torture is Not an American Value'

By Natasha Mayers

Audio Stream/ Podcast: John Perkins on "The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth about Global Corruption"

So the lawsuit today that’s being brought by a New York lawyer and some Ecuadorian lawyers -- Steve Donziger here in New York -- is for $6 billion, the largest environmental lawsuit in the history of the world, in the name of 30,000 Ecuadorian people against Texaco, which is now owned by Chevron, for dumping over eighteen billion gallons of toxic waste into the Ecuadorian rainforest. That’s thirty times more than the Exxon Valdez. And dozens and dozens of people have died and are continuing to die of cancer and other pollution-related diseases in this area of the Amazon...

...“You know, I’ve seen a lot of companies make mistakes and then try to defend themselves in law courts.” And he said, “That’s one thing. But in this case, Texaco didn’t make mistakes. This was done with intent. They knew what they were doing. To save a few bucks, they killed a lot of people.” And now they’re going to be forced to pay for that, to take responsibility for that, and hopefully open the door to make many companies take responsibility for the wanton destruction that’s occurred.

Catholic Colbert

Lots of clips...

Book Recommendation: Arise, my love..."

Just getting into this. I highly recommend it:

“Arise, my love…”: Mysticism for a New Era
William Johnston., Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 2000. Pp. 261

Review by Anton Hoogland, O. Carm.
Manila, Center for Spirituality

In October 1986 religious leaders from all over the world came together in Assisi upon the invitation of Pope John Paul II to pray for peace. It was a historic moment. The writer quotes Tennyson saying that “more things are wrought with prayer than these world dreams of.” As we enter the third millennium Johnson says that mystical prayer or mysticism assumes an importance it has never had before. By mysticism he means wisdom, the wisdom that goes beyond words and letters, beyond reasoning and thinking, beyond imagining and fantasy, beyond before and after into the timeless reality. Mysticism then is quite different from the knowledge that comes from understanding and judging.
In the West many parish churches have closed their doors. Well-established Catholic organizations and institutes have disappeared over the last decades. People have turned away from a church that paid more attention to truth "than to the subjective experience, to the process by which a person comes to the truth and to the conscience of every human person.
Empty churches cannot be equated with a-religiosity. There is a great hunger for spiritual experience. Thousands of peoples traveled to the East in the third quarter of the 20th century. People became more and more dissatisfied with an institutional religion that asked them to believe dry doctrines and dogmas and to follow blindly rules and regulations. Lonergan makes a distinction between a superstructure that is cultural and is crumbling, and the core which is faith. Many, even in the Church's top echelon, do not know how to distinguish the two.
The Second Vatican Council was a hope-filled and refreshing happening. It realized the need of so many Christians for a Church of dialogue and love. People are more in need of wisdom than knowledge, of love rather than of laws. The Christian mystical path has one distinctive feature; it is above all a path of love.
Asia is the home of billions of deeply religious people who have been taught to pray and meditate in their own great religious traditions. Their values, their history and their culture have been shaped by the great religions. While Buddhist and Christian mysticism have much in common, both being forms of transcendental wisdom, one cannot say they are the same. It is possible that they are complementary. The fundamental difference is that while the Hindu and the Buddhist focus primarily on a transformation of consciousness, the heart of Christian mysticism is a mystery of love.
During the Synod of the Asian bishops held in Rome April-May 1998 the bishops spoke frankly about inter-religious dialogue and about the woeful lack of inculturation in the Asian way of thinking and feeling. William Johnston says, "As Rome seeks reconciliation with Constantinople, with Geneva and with Canterbury, we hope that Rome will be open to inter-religious dialogue with Delhi, Beijing and Tokyo." A new mysticism is needed, that is holistic and will embrace both matter and spirit. The apophatic mysticism of darkness as we find among others in John of the Cross, must go hand in hand with the kataphatic mysticism of light. Mystical theology must include matter and the cosmic dimension of the Incarnation, the Resurrection and the Second Coming.
A mystical theology that will appeal to the 21st century must listen to the hungry, the marginalized and the oppressed. It must listen to liberation theology. And finally, mystical theology needs Asian mysticism which seeks the unity of the universe and the human person. Asian religious thought in dialogue with the Christian tradition of the Western and Eastern Churches will form the basis of a mystical theology of the future. From the side of the Christian Church a deep humility and conversion is necessary. The Japanese bishops say, "The church, learning from the kenosis of Jesus Christ, should be humble and open its heart to other religions to deepen its understanding of the Mystery of Christ." While Johnson brings us on a journey through the Buddhist and Hindu traditions he is concerned principally with Christian mysticism. It is the self-emptying of the Christian mystic in imitation of Jesus who “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave,” that leads to the highest wisdom.
Johnston writes in simple and understandable words an inspiring message for all who struggle with the decline of a western church but who hope for a re-born Christianity. Johnson believes that our global era presents us with major challenges calling for new mystics. Focusing on the Incarnation as the distinctively Christian gift in the global world, he suggests a more mystical approach to Scripture and Christian theology. His great knowledge of the great eastern religions and his inculturation in the eastern culture qualify him eminently for the topic of this book: mysticism for a new era.

Homosexuality & the Church, Two Views - Eve Tushnet | Luke Timothy Johnson

Commonweal, June 15, 2007 / Volume CXXXIV, Number 12

Saving the Child

"Two Roman Catholic priests, Jesuit Fr. Steve Kelly and Franciscan Fr. Louie Vitale, are willing to go to prison to expose the fact that young soldiers at Fort Huachuca are being trained to torture. Further, one of those young soldiers has already committed suicide after going into the prisoners' cages as an interrogator in northern Iraq." - "Torture Training at Ft. Huachucha", CounterPunch, June 7, 2007.Armed with truth, "These priests are armed with a message about the proliferation of U.S. torture, secret prisons, depleted uranium and prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba who are never charged. It is about torture and the United States violation of the Geneva Conventions."....Full post here at nonviolentjesus.blogspot.com/

What Do Subsidized Corn, A Militarized Border, and Finance Reform Have To Do With It?

...But why are so many people risking their lives to come into our country now? When did this big rush begin?
It began when Mr. Clinton approved NAFTA – the North American Free Trade Agreement, and when he militarized our southern border at the same time. Prior to these combined actions, families crossed the border very commonly and casually, especially during harvest seasons. After harvest, they would go home to Mexico or Central America because that’s where they lived with their families in quite happy communities.
When the border was militarized, it became too risky to go back and forth. So they stayed.
Why did Mr. Clinton militarize the border? He did so because NAFTA was about to pull the rug out from under Mexico’s small family farms. We flooded Mexico with cheap corn–exports that we now subsidize to the tune of some $25 billion dollars a year. Congress gives that money of ours to a handful of agribusiness giants. Of course, I am not here to tell you why Congress does that, and what might be done to stop it, such as with the public financing of campaigns. But they do it, and Mexican family farmers cannot compete. In the years since NAFTA was signed, half of Mexico’s small farms have failed. The only kind of farming that can now compete in Mexico is big agribusiness, which does not employ as many people. Tortillas in Mexico now contain two-thirds imported corn, and they are three times as expensive at retail level than before NAFTA. The people have less money, and the cost of food is rising. We have done that. Our precious Senators and Congressmen and their corporate cronies have enforced that raw and cruel exploitation in our names.
The result of undermining Mexican farms, as Clinton expected, was a rising flood of poor people moving from rural areas into Mexico’s big cities, which have become so poor and overcrowded that all one can do is dream of going north across the border.
Now, if any Democratic candidates for President would like to show a little courage and intelligence, let them address the real cause of our flood of unauthorized immigrants. Will Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Obama or Mr. Edwards or any of the other candidates face down the agri- gangsters that are behind this problem? Probably they will not, so long as Iowa has a major primary.
Let me say that I am not ranting and raving in the least about these new Americans. When Mexico owned Texas and everything west of Texas, and when Mexico cut off migration across their borders into Texas, our people kept coming anyway –crossing illegally in search of opportunities for their families. When Mexico got upset by this, we trumped-up false reasons for a war, and we illegally took those lands. If that wasn’t enough law and order for you, we also conducted unfettered genocide against the region’s native people. So let’s not stand on any moral high ground regarding that southern border.
The people coming across the border today, with the usual exceptions, are family people with an incredible work ethic. Personally, I welcome them. I congratulate them for their courage and their dedication to their families. I want them to stay and become citizens, or, if some prefer, to return to their homeland at a time when there is international justice and a decent chance for their prosperity at home.
I regret what the political corruption of our system has done to their farms and their communities back home. It is not the peoples’ fault –it is the fault of corrupt leaders of both parties and both nations. We must speak this truth to these powerful people, even to those presidential candidates whom we otherwise admire....

CLICK HERE FOR FULL ARTICLE [and check out the comments/discussion after the article]

Ron Paul at the June 5 Republican Debate

Ron Paul’s Reading List for the Farsighted

An Ethical Way to End the War in Iraq: Generosity Beats Domination as a Strategy for Homeland Security

Fauhemians

Click here for my friend Mark's take on the article...

Why the hipster must die: The hipsterati talks back

Click here for hipster essay feedback

[" ...You ruined everything hipsters now go work for your Dad's Pharmaceutical company in Ohio and get out of NYC." —Kevin Murphy, Brooklyn ]

Crude Designs: The Rip-Off of Iraq’s Oil Wealth

Blind Guides...

[Thanks again to Stephen at TCR for posting this]

Christian Just War Theory and Moral Laxism:
A Chronically Misleading Episcopal Witness

Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

"The Holy Father’s judgment is also convincing from a rational point of view. There were not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against Iraq". ---Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger Prefect, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, May 2, 2003

....Blind Guides
The Catholic bishops of the United States today are doing great harm to the Church Universal, to the U.S. Catholic Church, to the people of Iraq, and to the American people. By their chosen silence they have become moral accessories to unjustified woe, waste and desolation in human life. Accessories are enablers. The bishops by continuing to project, via their silence, an aura of strict moral certainty with respect to this war on Iraq are a significant moral support apparatus for recruiting for it, for voting for it, for electing representatives who endorse it and for continuing to kill and maim people in it. The U.S. bishops, however, by taking this morally laxist position are acting in lockstep with a seventeen-hundred-year-old modus operandi made visible in all the Churches of Christianity—Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant. Theirs is but the contemporary Americanized meme of the old Constantinian pastoral practice of pious and politically street-smart "blind guides" (Mt 15:14) leading those they have kept blind down the primrose path of holy homicide on behalf of the local power brokers, economic elites and lords of war—instead of leading their flocks along the Way that the Lamb of God teaches by word and deed.9

It is time to stop! A laxist moral system of interpretation is forbidden because it undermines all obedience to morality. The de facto witnessing to its validity is a most grave episcopal failure—especially when applied where a strict interpretation is obligatory. Such a witness is the public camouflaging of evil under the veneer of good and beneath the trappings of Christian religiosity. It is giving a false, misleading, Orwellian doublethink witness concerning the Way of Eternal Life. It is placing "is" where "is not" belongs. A bishop’s supreme obligation, as a bishop, before God and to his people is the salvation of souls. Being a CEO administering and protecting the assets of a corporation is a secondary episcopal occupation, if that. When the latter of these tasks controls the interpretation of the former, rather than the former controlling the operations of the latter, then an about-face is the only way back to being faithful to the vocation to which one has been called by Christ-God. This is a vocation to shepherd along the Way of Eternal Salvation those whom God has entrusted to you. It is a commission to protect His lambs, His anawim, from the craft of the wolves of evil and to feed His sheep with the teachings of Jesus and with Jesus. Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not being duped by morality.


READ FULL ARTICLE HERE

Kiva Microloans

My friend Alex just showed me this. "Better to light a candle than curse the darkness", as the saying goes. Well worth checking out and getting involved in...

Share the World's Resources

Good online radio station...

About Us
English
Radio Tomate uses correspondents, lifelong experience and political sources throughout the region to present informative debate on the issues which historically have separated the Americas. Radio Tomate uses interactive technology to define business, culture, history, music, statistical information, humor and politics of the region.
Spanish
Radio Tomate, La Radio del Pueblo; información, notícias, política, música, y temas diversos que unen al mundo de habla español. Aqui no hay fronteras, ni barerras, ni antenas, ni clases sociales; solo una busqueda de los hechos reales, y la participación tuya en encontrar soluciones.

Immigration and the New Global Plantation, by Judith Moriarty

Via Stephen at TCR

Immigration and the New Global Plantation
By Judith Moriarty

The real issue of the immigration crisis is lost in the orchestrated media hype of intolerance and charges of racism should anyone dare try to discuss this in a rational, coherent manner.
Small rust belt towns with their echoing factories shipped overseas are suddenly overwhelmed, and thus their tax base (meeting medical, welfare, housing, education needs) goes through the roof. Many in these small towns, absent the auto job, meat packing job (now overtaken with foreign workers), textile plants etc, have citizens working at two or three service sector jobs to survive or are on fixed incomes. They are made to support the ever escalating costs of government employees (state and local) and to pay for the obscene medical costs (ever rising) for these employees, while they are unable to afford their own basic medical needs.
None of this is discussed in the theater of these ridiculous election debates (really scripted sound byte nonsense). Why should it be? These government officials are well cared for in their medical coverage - again by taxpayers. They are afforded the best of (instant) care in the finest of hospitals. Dick Cheney's numerous heart operations - medications - and an specially equipped hospital room, in his residence is easily paid for ---by us.
Meanwhile the common man is subject (if he is fortunate to have coverage) to some drone sitting in a cubicle leafing through a book of regulations, to determine if such and such a procedure or medication is approved! Mastectomies are all but drive-through operations - with only the elite, and the politicians, afforded more than a day of specialized care in the hospital. If you're homeless - tough luck - you're dead. In my experience working with the homeless I never saw ONE (mostly young) AIDS individual survive over a year - not a ONE (no Magic Johnson treatment here).
Clinton, Bush and the Global Plantation
Nowhere do we see it discussed as to why millions are dispossessed from the land of their births / culture / family connections and relocated, or having to escape to foreign lands as economic refugees). None of the draconian effects of these various trade treaties in their quest to construct a global plantation of sorts to satisfy the corporate money barons is ever discussed on the public stage. These treaties go unread or debated by Congress with only an up or down vote taking place. ... CONTINUE

CloudOfWitnesses

Robert Newman, "The History of Oil" [google video]

Educate yourselves...

"What If Our Mercenaries Turn On Us?", by Chris Hedges

Published on Sunday, June 3, 2007 by the Philadelphia Inquirer
What If Our Mercenaries Turn On Us?
by Chris Hedges
Armed units from the private security firm Blackwater USA opened fire in Baghdad streets twice in two days last week. It triggered a standoff between the security contractors and Iraqi forces, a reminder that the war in Iraq may be remembered mostly in our history books for empowering and building America’s first modern mercenary army.There are an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 armed security contractors working in Iraq, although there are no official figures and some estimates run much higher. Security contractors are not counted as part of the coalition forces. When the number of private mercenary fighters is added to other civilian military “contractors” who carry out logistical support activities such as food preparation, the number rises to about 126,000.
“We got 126,000 contractors over there, some of them making more than the secretary of defense,” said House defense appropriations subcommittee Chairman John Murtha (D., Pa.). “How in the hell do you justify that?”
The privatization of war hands an incentive to American corporations, many with tremendous political clout, to keep us mired down in Iraq. But even more disturbing is the steady rise of this modern Praetorian Guard. The Praetorian Guard in ancient Rome was a paramilitary force that defied legal constraints, made violence part of the political discourse, and eventually plunged the Roman Republic into tyranny and despotism. Despotic movements need paramilitary forces that operate outside the law, forces that sow fear among potential opponents, and are capable of physically silencing those branded by their leaders as traitors. And in the wrong hands, a Blackwater could well become that force.
American taxpayers have so far handed a staggering $4 billion to “armed security” companies in Iraq such as Blackwater, according to House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.). Tens of billions more have been paid to companies that provide logistical support. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D., Ill.) of the House Intelligence Committee estimates that 40 cents of every dollar spent on the occupation has gone to war contractors. It is unlikely that any of these corporations will push for an early withdrawal. The profits are too lucrative.
Mercenary forces like Blackwater operate beyond civilian and military law. They are covered by a 2004 edict passed by American occupation authorities in Iraq that immunizes all civilian contractors in Iraq from prosecution.
Blackwater, barely a decade old, has migrated from Iraq to set up operations in the United States and nine other countries. It trains Afghan security forces and has established a base a few miles from the Iranian border. The huge contracts from the war - including $750 million from the State Department since 2004 - have allowed Blackwater to amass a fleet of more than 20 aircraft, including helicopter gunships. Jeremy Scahill, the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, points out that Blackwater has also constructed “the world’s largest private military facility - a 7,000-acre compound near the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina.” Blackwater also recently opened a facility in Illinois (”Blackwater North”) and, despite local opposition, is moving ahead with plans to build another huge training base near San Diego. The company recently announced it was creating a private intelligence branch called “Total Intelligence.”
Erik Prince, who founded and runs Blackwater, is a man who appears to have little time for the niceties of democracy. He has close ties with the radical Christian Right and the Bush White House. He champions his company as a patriotic extension of the U.S. military. His employees, in an act as cynical as it is dishonest, take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution. But what he and his allies have built is a mercenary army, paid for with government money, which operates outside the law and without constitutional constraint.
Mercenary units are a vital instrument in the hands of despotic movements. Communist and fascist movements during the last century each built rogue paramilitary forces. And the appearance of Blackwater fighters, heavily armed and wearing their trademark black uniforms, patrolling the streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, may be a grim taste of the future. In New Orleans Blackwater charged the government $240,000 a day.
” ‘It cannot happen here’ is always wrong,” the philosopher Karl Popper wrote. “A dictatorship can happen anywhere.”
The word contractor helps launder the fear and threat out of a more accurate term: “paramilitary force.” We’re not supposed to have such forces in the United States, but we now do. And if we have them, we have a potential threat to democracy. On U.S. soil, Blackwater so far has shown few signs of being an out-and-out rogue retainer army, though they looked the part in New Orleans. But were this country to become even a little less stable, outfits like Blackwater might see a heyday. If the United States falls into a period of instability caused by another catastrophic terrorist attack, an economic meltdown that triggers social unrest, or a series of environmental disasters, such paramilitary forces, protected and assisted by fellow ideologues in the police and military, could ruthlessly abolish what is left of our eroding democracy. War, with the huge profits it hands to corporations, and to right-wing interests such as the Christian Right, could become a permanent condition. And the thugs with automatic weapons, black uniforms and wraparound sunglasses who appeared on the streets in New Orleans could appear on our streets.
Chris Hedges (hedgesscoop@aol.com) is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and won a Pulitzer Prize as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times. He is author, mostly recently, of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.”
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Michael at catholicanarchy writes:

Eberhard Bethge on American Christianity

m General, Theology, Political, Church, War/Militarism Sunday, June 3rd, 2007

Halden Doerge presents us with a passage from John DeGruchy’s biography of Eberhard Bethge, the biographer and close friend of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The passage recounts Bethge’s feelings after his visit to Jerry Falwell’s church.
Staying in Lynchburg, the headquarters of the Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell, also provided an opportunity for them [the Bethges] to experience the heartbeat of American fundamentalism. The Bethges were particularly bothered by what they experienced when they visited Falwell’s church because so much that was referred to as ‘American Christianity’ reminded them of aspects of the German Christianity of the 1930s. Eberhard later wrote,
As we entered the foyer, an usher stepped forward and gave me two badges to fasten to my lapel: the on on the left said, Jesus First and on the right, one with an American flag…I could not help but think myself in Germany in 1933…Of course, ‘Jesus First’, but and American Jesus! And so to the long history of faith and its executors another chapter is being added of a mixed image of Christ, of another syncretism on the American model, undisturbed by and knowledge of that centuries-long and sad history.
Bethge added some remarks that have an uncanny contemporary ring to them:
The disturbing fact is this new element, the battle for a ‘Christian nation’ against humanism. The flag has always been in the churches, but now it has come to represent the new threat of binding the political structure to an ideology, which models a whole new educational system, and a new kind of representation in Washington, and a newly interpreted Constitution.
For Bethge, who had a great love for the United States and the democratic vision of its Founding Fathers, and who enjoyed visiting there, these signs were disturbing. He could only hope that they would not develop along the lines he feared they might.
(John W. de Gruchy, Daring, Trusting Spirit: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Friend Eberhard Bethge [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005], 200-201.)
Halden’s remarks on the passage are right on, and relevant in light of discussions about American Christian nationalism that are taking place here and at Vox Nova.
Unfortunately, I fear that Bethge’s fears for America have begun to be realized. In an age of nationalism and uncritical patriotism in the churches in America we must all ask ourselves how close we are to becoming no different than the German Christians of Bonhoeffer’s and Bethge’s day. May God have mercy on us and forgive us and give us the strength to speak the truth to powers and embody the life of the kingdom of God though it send us to the cross or the gallows.
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